This series of blog posts includes the most important announcements and major updates regarding Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Azure Stack, officialized by Microsoft in the last two weeks.
Azure
Compute
Azure HX series and HBv4 series virtual machines (preview)
The Azure HX series and HBv4 series virtual machines (VMs) are now in preview in the East US region. These VMs, powered by AMD 4th gen EPYCTM “Genoa” CPUs, improve the performance and cost-effectiveness of a variety of memory performance bound, compute bound, and massively parallel workloads. These new VMs deliver more performance, value-adding innovation, and cost-effectiveness to every Azure HPC customer.
Networking
Azure Bastion now support shareable links (preview)
With the new Azure Bastion shareable links feature in public preview and included in Standard SKU, you can now connect to a target resource (virtual machine or virtual machine scale set) using Azure Bastion without accessing the Azure portal.
This feature will solve two key pain points:
- Administrators will no longer have to provide full access to their Azure accounts to one-time VM users, helping to maintain their privacy and security.
- Users without Azure subscriptions can seamlessly connect to VMs without exposing RDP/SSH ports to the public internet.
Storage
Azure File Sync agent v15.2
Azure File Sync agent v15.2 is now on Microsoft Update and Microsoft Download Center.
Improvements and issues that are fixed:
- Fixed a cloud tiering issue in the v15.1 agent that caused the following symptoms:
- Memory usage is higher after upgrading to v15.1
- Storage Sync Agent (FileSyncSvc) service intermittently crashes
- Files are failing to recall with error ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE (0x00000006)
- Fixed a health reporting issue with servers configured to use a non-Gregorian calendar
More information about this release:
- This release is available for Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2022 installations
- The agent version for this release is 15.2.0.0
- Installation instructions are documented in KB5013875
